Sims 4 Render Lighting Tutorial
"Environmental Lighting" won my most recent poll, so let's get right into it!
A few notes before we begin:
I render exclusively in cycles!
This tutorial assumes some basic knowledge of blender
Though this tutorial covers the basics, HDRIs can be used in conjunction with any scene/your built scenes
I decided to focus on environmental and other lighting in this tutorial, since they all kind of go hand in hand.
For this tutorial, I'll be using my recent Cupid Sim. Here's a render of her with no additional lighting:
1. Base lighting
In any full body, single sim render (like lookbooks, for example), I really like to use a glowing base. It grounds the sim a bit and casts some interesting lighting on them.
To do this, I add a circle under their feet by pressing shift+A and selecting circle.
An empty circle will appear, but we need it to be a solid disk, so go into Edit mode (by pressing tab while the circle is selected) then hitting F on the keyboard to fill it.
After that, you can go into the Materials tab and add in color and glow.
Mine is adjusted like this:
And gives this rendered result:
2. HDRIs
HDRIs (High Dynamic Range images) are extremely useful when it comes to environmental lighting, I always use them now to add better/more dynamic lighting to my renders.
HDRIs are 3D/panoramic, which makes them extremely useful.
You can find/download HDRIs online in a few diff places: PolyHaven, AmbientCO, and Blender Market.
There are also several available for FREE using BlenderKit (my preferred method).
So how do you use an HDRI?
We can add HDRIs to our render by navigating to the world tab and changing the color to "environment texture".
I chose this vaporware HDRI from BlenderKit, & here it is with no adjustments, but it's looking a little rough so let's adjust it.
By adding vector nodes, we can adjust how the HDRI behaves. Here I mostly use the Z rotation and the background strength:
Here's the same render with the Z-rotation set to 50, 150, 200, & 250.
You can put in any value for the Z-rotation, this is just an example of how the HDRI turns. This is maybe not the best example of the rotation, but putting her in a forest just didn't feel right lmfaooo, hopefully you can see how the light changes on her depending on the rotation.
You can also adjust the strength of the HDRI. Here's the HDRI (rotated to 150) set at .5 and 1.5 strength:
For this tutorial, my favorite lighting is the HDRI set to 150, and the strength set to .5, like this (this is a rendered image):
3. Transparent HDRIs + Point Lights
But I'm not fully happy with the lighting. I don't love how the HDRI is a bit blurry, so I'm going to set it to be transparent.
To do this, go to the Render Tab, scroll down to the Film option, and check Transparent:
The lighting effect from the HDRI will stay the same, but the background will be transparent.
From here, you can add a background (when I do this, I like adding a plane, & moving/shading it until I'm happy (kinda like this):
NOTE that you have to put the plane far enough behind your sim so it doesn't affect the HDRI lighting too much.
SECOND NOTE You can use this same method to use HDRIs in conjunction with scenes. They can provide the perfect backdrop!
This is still really dark, so I'm going to add three point lights: -Two on either side of her head/shoulders that will be smaller (in radius) and brighter -One in front of her to add actual light (so details aren't lost)
Here's how I set up my lights.
The pink light settings are for the two point lights on the sides The white light setting is for the light in front of her
For a basic render, this is almost good enough for me, but I really like the glowing effect I get in my renders.
To achieve this, we have to go to the compositing tab:
4. Compositing
Full disclosure, my compositing tab is set to glow by default (that's how much I love it), so all of the renders in this tutorial have it turned on.
I use the glare node and set it to fog glow.
Here's my preferred setting:
I prefer the fog glow effect, but bloom, ghost, streaks and star are also options.
Here's a guide to the glare node!
Tbh, I never use any of the other settings, so I'll leave this tutorial here for today.
Here's the final result (with no additional editing):
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to send an ask, message or join my discord (no minors pls) for help! <3
